After graduating as a forest engineer in his native Spain and then finding work last summer by fighting the worst wildfires in a decade, Carlos Molina decided it was time to take his education to the next level.

Global warming had been on his radar screen for a long time, he said in an interview at the University of B.C.’s Forest Sciences Centre.

“It’s been one of the main drivers behind my aspirations.”

This summer’s fires were a tipping point for him. The driest winter in 70 years, above-average summer temperatures, and forest policies in disarray because of Spanish budget cuts were all blamed for the wildfires. Molina saw a changing environment in the forests and his country’s inability to respond effectively. There’s got to be a better way to do things, he told himself.

He decided to make the trip to B.C. to enrol in a new master’s degree program on sustainable forest management being offered at the UBC Faculty of Forestry, where the whole focus is on finding that better way.

Molina is typical of the students being drawn to forestry today. The 14 graduate students in the new program come from Asia, Europe, other provinces and the resource towns that dot British Columbia. They all share Molina’s passion to be catalysts in developing new management practices focused on sustainability. They are the new generation of foresters, and they view the world through a different lens than those who went before.

“We are the generation that has grown up with David Suzuki,” said Stacey Auld, from Winnipeg. “We have been educated from a young age as viewing the earth as being a unique and beautiful place. This is one of our core values.”

The program’s inaugural year began in August, while Spain’s fires were still raging. The mandate is to bring together students from diverse disciplines and countries and deliver a hands-on immersion in managing the long-term health of forest landscapes so they can continue to provide environmental, economic and social benefits.

The program reflects a renewed interest in forestry and a growing need for foresters with a diverse educational background. Undergraduate enrolment at the UBC Faculty of Forestry, the largest in the country, has been climbing year-over-year for a decade. After hitting a low of 441 undergraduates in the 2002/03 academic year, it has grown by more than 50 per cent to 689.

For Auld, whose interest is urban landscape design, issues like flooding in southern Manitoba hold a special interest. The inability of the urban landscape to hold water are a factor in the floods, she said. Urban forests and a more integrated decision-making approach that takes in a broader landscape could be part of the solution. Her prime focus, she said, is to see how sustainable forestry and management practices can be integrated into green building and landscape design guidelines.

“I will probably take the same information we are all learning — we are learning silviculture; we are learning policy; we have got a little bit of history and the future outlook — to influence (urban design) policies,” Auld said.

Taiwanese student Judy Huang, who completed her undergraduate degree in Taiwan last June, said she hopes to gain a greater understanding of how to address some of the conflicting attitudes around sustainability. In Taiwan, she said, domestic forests are protected; there is virtually no logging, yet there is acceptance of logs that are imported from foreign tropical forests where sustainable practices may or may not be maintained.

Program director Stephen Mitchell, an associate professor in the faculty of forestry, said one of the motivations for the program was the need for people who have a solid foundation in an academic discipline and who can apply it to a broad range of career situations. Sustainable forest management, he said, means balancing the conservation and protection roles of forests with their ability to produce the goods and services that society needs.

“We need to have people who have this disciplinary background, but also — as forestry as a profession increasingly incorporates people with different types of backgrounds — we need all these people to speak a common language so they can communicate with each other.

“There are a variety of opportunities out there because there is a variety of potential employers out there. Even municipalities are interested in having foresters on staff to manage their green spaces. It’s not just forest companies any more.”

Randy Trerise, registrar at the Association of B.C. Forest Professionals, said the profession needs this new breed of students. It’s not just the students who have developed new values. Society’s values have also changed regarding forests, and forest professionals need skills to meet the challenge. The profession has recovered from the “Battle of the Woods” days in B.C., he said, when foresters were effectively portrayed as the bad guys by environmentalists. Now the forester is just as likely to be the environmentalist.

“Forestry is changing, and it is changing in a way that society is changing,” he said. Timber extraction is still an important value, but the focus is now on managing for environmental, economic, and social sustainability.

“It’s a much broader skill-set that’s required than what we had in the past,” he said. “In the old days, it used to be all about getting the wood to the mill. Now, there is much more out there.”

Trerise said foresters today are just as likely to be doing inventories of carbon or wildlife instead of timber; or managing for bioenergy or a carbon sequestration program. And with greater community and first nations involvement in forestry, other values, such as water retention or cultural heritage could be the management focus, Trerise said.

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